


The Season of Grace

by Dira Sudis (dsudis)



Category: Oxford Time Travel universe - Willis
Genre: Gen, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-19
Updated: 2009-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-04 16:17:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/32102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dsudis/pseuds/Dira%20Sudis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>The strangest thing about it, beforehand, is that no one tries to stop her from going. </em></p>
            </blockquote>





	The Season of Grace

**Author's Note:**

  * For [akamarykate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/akamarykate/gifts).



The strangest thing about it, beforehand, is that no one tries to stop her from going. Kivrin has spent years perfecting her arguments, but in the end it's utterly routine.

There's so much paperwork that it occasionally feels as if she's being deliberately delayed, but she knows perfectly well that all the forms she fills in are standard. They even spend the usual amount of time being mislaid, misdirected, and misinterpreted. It only feels like more because she is the lead--the sole--historian on the project.

Kivrin is prepared to call off the drop if the slightest thing goes wrong, and she schedules it lapse-time for a perfectly ordinary weekday morning in the third week of term, when everyone is bright-eyed and alert. No one is rushing off for the holidays. No one is harried with other deadlines. It's all quite ordinary.

She shoulders her pack, full of recording equipment and supplies. It's passable fourteenth century style on the outside, cutting-edge twenty-first inside. The pack is responsible for its own weight in requisitions, permits, and waivers, none of which would have availed her anything if Probability had not calculated a nearly null possibility of her meeting any contemps on this drop. It's her own account of the day in question driving Probability, of course, confirmed by Dunworthy and Colin's testimony. It feels like cheating, but for once she knows exactly how reliable the information is. Parameter checks suggest just minutes of slippage as long as she goes to the night after they brought her home.

She steps into the net and takes her place standing upright this time, wearing a long drab gown--Tyflex insulation backing the hand-woven wool--that covers excellent hiking boots. She fastens a hooded cape in place, covering everything but her face and hands. She'll pass as a contemp from a distance, which should be as much as she needs. She considered cross-dressing, for greater ease of movement--she has the build for it, and she's done it for there-and-back checks to the thirteenth century--but she's planning to stay hours, possibly a full day. She can hide her boots if she has to, but she doesn't want to give up a gentlewoman's benefit of the doubt. She's used to moving, working, and if necessary running in long skirts, anyway. She's spent four of the last five years as the world's leading practical historian of the Mediaeval period.

She spent the first of those five years in and out of hospital with insomnia, inexplicable fevers, and persistent tremors in her hands--but then Lady Schrapnell and her cathedral had started approaching over the horizon. Kivrin had to choose between pursuing safe theoretical studies within the woman's rapidly expanding sphere of influence or becoming suddenly unavoidably busy for the next several years with cutting edge practical work. She'd bolted back to the Middle Ages and found herself much recovered.

Now, after four years sidling round the edges of it, she is about to go back to the beginning and finish the thing properly. Ashencote, wiped off the map by the plague, offers a unique opportunity to visually and spatially document an intact but uninhabited village in 1349. Kivrin already knows the terrain and will be able to efficiently survey the area.

No one has suggested that she might have some other reason for wanting to go back. She thinks sometimes that it's obvious to all of them; she can't decide whether they're humoring her or simply don't care.

That's not true. She knows it's obvious to Dunworthy, and she knows he cares. Dunworthy has been standing aside and letting her do what she needs to do for years now, and she didn't imagine that he'd interfere now, even so much as to make her acknowledge that this drop is different.

It's routine. She takes her place on the mark, and Andrews lowers the shields. There's a sparkle of condensation and then a shock of cold. The condensation is shimmering in the starlight and there is snow underfoot. She's standing just where the adjusted locational coordinates--thoroughly tested with unmanneds--were intended to send her: she is in the courtyard, facing the manor house. When she turns her head she sees the stable and the barn, and to the other side the kitchen, the dovecote, the brewhouse.

It is all exactly the same as she remembers it was five years ago. Yesterday.

Kivrin stands very still. She takes deep breaths and does so easily, in the absence of pneumonia or broken ribs. She has dreamed of being back here. Other historians have told her they dream of their practicum drops, too. She and Bartholomew still have a drink together now and then; five years on they still don't talk about the Black Death, the Blitz, or nightmares. Kivrin breathes, and thinks of how this is unlike her nightmares. It's the silence, mostly, because in her dreams the bell is always tolling.

In a few moments she's past the danger of the bad old panic taking hold, and able to get on with the routine first moments of a drop.

The first thing to do, as always, is to determine her precise time and date, as she's already comfortably certain of location. She has Ashencote's precise coordinates, in fact, determined after her practicum with the help of Colin's locator and a survey map.

The moon, not quite full, is hanging above the trees to the west. Kivrin sets her pack down and digs out her handheld to check the elevation. She sights a few circumpolar stars off Polaris, and feeds in the readings to the astronomical calculator. After a moment, it gives her the time: she's come to three o'clock in the morning on January 7, 1349. Slippage is inside the margin of error of the time calculation, which means there is no danger at all of her encountering anyone.

With that determined, Kivrin puts the handheld back and gets out her next item of modern technology: a pair of well-insulated gloves. She doesn't mind her nose and cheeks getting a little numb, but she's going to need her fingers in working order. Shouldering the pack again, Kivrin walks in a small circle, tamping down the snow to mark the drop with a welter of anachronistic bootprints. Then she looks around, considering.

The night is clear and her eyes are adjusting quickly. There's plenty of light to move around by, but the vid recording will look much better if she waits for dawn. This was certainly a contingency she considered when she set the drop to three in the morning; slippage of up to six hours was a real possibility, and she wanted to be sure of a morning start, but this, technically, is the ideal outcome.

Kivrin takes another deep breath and lets it out in a gout of steam, and then steps decisively out of the fairy ring of her own footprints. She will do the most important thing first, then, even if it's also the most difficult. The recording can wait until daylight.

Kivrin walks over to the dark, narrow passage between the stable and barn, leading out to the green. The path is hard-packed and smooth, nearly free of snow, with no obstacles to slow her down despite the darkness.

She hesitates in the last sheltered spot. Though a glance upward confirms that the sky is still clear, the wind is whipping the fallen snow into a shifting screen of white--in some places just a suspended sparkle in the air, like the net, and in other places almost solid. Kivrin watches until she has oriented herself--the creek on the far side of the green, the huts down the near edge, and beyond them all the church, sometimes visible as a dark shape, sometimes disappearing altogether.

Kivrin takes down the pack and removes a folding shovel, quickly extending the handle and locking it into place. According to the forms she filled in, she requires it on the drop for the possible excavation of a sample grave; for now it will do just as well as a walking stick, to test the drifts. Bowing her head, she sets out across the green, each step obscuring the straight cut of the shovel's blade through the snow.

The wind is capricious, icy cold but changeable. It only plucks at her hood and skirt, rather than trying to slice through them. The blowing snow stings her cheeks, making her eyes blur with tears, but Kivrin keeps her eyes on the ground and checks every step before she takes it, and doesn't worry about her momentarily impaired vision.

She stops short when the next downswing of the shovel ends in a harder crunch. She has crossed the green already, and stands at the edge of the narrow track before the church. Sighting off the lychgate, she finds her way to the graves in the hastily-consecrated ground on the green. They are distinguishable despite the blowing snow, and Kivrin finds her way to the last four: the steward and his son. Eliwys. Rosemund.

Kivrin turns her back to Rosemund, with the church to her left, and paces the distance she remembers. Clearing away snow with her shovel, she finds the place where she managed to clear away the grass. The snapped wooden blade of the steward's spade lies on the bare earth. The handle will be in the churchyard; she took it with her after the spade broke, leaning on it as a crutch. Even with its help she had crumpled to the earth just past Agnes' grave. It was only the terror of infecting more innocent people that had gotten Kivrin to her feet when Dunworthy and Colin came.

Kivrin shakes off the memory and kicks aside the broken piece of the spade. The shovel she brought along is plastalloy, with a straight, thin edge. When she drives it into the earth it cuts easily thirty centimeters into the hard-frozen ground. Kivrin wiggles it back and forth, making a crevice, then, sighting along the graves, makes two more cracks in the cleared ground, above and below the first. From the pack she takes three bright orange chemical heat-tubes. She cracks each one to activate it and drops them in. They'll thaw the ground for her, at least the first meter.

She drives the shovel into the earth again, above the furthest of the cuts she's made, and leaves it standing there to mark the spot. Then, after another deep breath, she turns and walks briskly across the lane, barely breaking stride to open the church door. She only comes to a halt when it falls shut behind her, and she is plunged into darkness.

The light of the moon and stars makes the nearer windows glow, showing off their rich colors but casting almost no light into the black cavern of the church. She waits to see whether her eyes will adjust to the darkness, breathing deeply and slowly while she waits for her practicum dreams to take shape before her. She can make out shapes--the nearest pillars, the tomb, perhaps the edges of the rood screen--when she realizes that the cold of the flagstones is seeping up through her feet and the pack's strap is dragging against her shoulder. This is not a dream, and she doesn't have to wait it out until she wakes.

Kivrin walks forward to the bulk of the first pillar on the right hand side. She kneels beside it--crossing herself automatically with one hand, rearranging her skirts just as automatically with the other, so that she will be kneeling on a fold of cloth but not pinning the dress down tightly to the front of her body. She sets the pack on the stones before her and locates, by touch, the palm-sized shape of a snap-light. Squeezing to activate it, she turns her head aside as golden luminescence suddenly pours out of the top of the pack. She trains her eyes on the stone pillar beside her as she brings the light out and sets it on the floor beside the pillar.

Only when her eyes have adjusted--only when she can stare directly at the little bright light without them watering--does Kivrin lift her face and look toward the altar. Toward where Roche lies.

He is just as she saw him last, lying before the rood screen with his hands crossed on his chest, inadequately covered by the bishop's envoy's fine purple cloak. Kivrin gets to her feet, picking up the pack but leaving the light where she placed it, and crosses the nave to kneel again beside him.

He looks strange in the steady, modern light she's brought with her. He is exactly the same, of course--the church has been easily as cold as a morgue, and she saw him last scarcely twelve hours ago. He only looks different to the way her memory has painted him in the intervening years.

To her five-years-older eye, which has grown accustomed to fourteenth century natives, he looks younger than she remembered. He was her own age--not the age she was then, which seems impossibly young now, but the age she is now. If she had waited much longer, she thinks, he would now look like a child to her, as she must have looked to him while he lived.

She sees the wet dot appear on the white silk cross at the same moment she registers the sensation of wetness rolling down her half-numb cheek. It's only then that Kivrin realizes she is crying. She wipes away the wetness on her cheek with her gloved hand, but her eyes keep welling up and won't stop. She closes her eyes and lets the tears come, having learned better by now than to fight them. She only struggles to keep her breathing quiet; she can't bear the thought of her sobs echoing through the stony silence of the church.

The tears chill quickly on her face, and she wipes them away again and again with the backs of her gloves. She stops only to press her fingers to her mouth, to stop herself from making a sound, but she can't breathe through her nose anymore. All solutions are short-lived.

Still, the crisis passes. Her eyes are hot and puffy and faintly sore, but she blinks and they stay clear. Her lips are shaping words, and she finally allows herself to speak, if only in a cautious whisper.

"I'm here," she says, and lays one hand over Roche's. "I'm here."

She's not speaking to him, not really. He's not here; he's gone to heaven, five years ago or seven hundred. At least a day. What she's come here to do is not for him; this shell he left behind can't touch him anymore.

For five years she has done what Roche asked her to do: she has prayed for his salvation, knowing that time makes no difference to the farthest and highest of observers. Every year on the Feast of the Epiphany, she goes to church--she doesn't fuss too much about the form of the service, where they place the candles, whether wax or laser, or in what order they say their prayers. Every year, afterward, she lights a candle for Roche.

Dunworthy comes with her, and she goes with him afterward to lay flowers on Dr. Ahrens' grave. The first year they went, Kivrin sat through the whole service holding her hands tightly together in her lap to try to hide their shaking. After, when she went to light the candle, Dunworthy reached out to steady her shaking hand on the taper; she hadn't the heart to tell him she didn't want his help, but she'd pulled away from him enough to do it on her own, and he'd waited in silence until she managed it.

Her hands are steady now, though her voice is not and her face is wet and hotly flushed. She briefly considers wiping her nose against the rough wool of her gown and then gives in to practicality and reaches into the pack. At the bottom is a heavy length of linen, folded up neatly. Hand-woven, undyed, decorated only with an historian's bits of practice embroidery at the corners and edges, it didn't require any forms to be filled in to account for its passage into the past.

Kivrin has been acquainted with it a long time, and she doesn't scruple now to use it to wipe her face clean and blow her nose, though she folds that corner up afterward. She doesn't imagine Roche will mind. With her face dry and her breathing restored to normal, she realizes that she doesn't feel the way she got accustomed to feeling, when the tears for this--for Roche, for Ashencote, for herself--could not be stopped.

This time she feels as if the poison has been drained. She's cut to the heart of the matter at last.

"I'm here," she says again, louder, and then smiles. She looks up toward the altar, feeling the cold stone under her knees, and recites, "You are not here to verify, instruct yourself, or inform curiosity or carry report. You are here to kneel where prayer has been valid."

She looks down on Roche again, whose prayer was surely valid, who lay dying and still insisted that she had saved him.

"You are here," Kivrin announces firmly, reaching for the shroud she brought with her, "to finish the job."

She starts with the damp, folded-over corner, laying it against the soles of his feet. Lifting his legs to wrap the cloth around, she remembers the Nursing for Historians seminar she attended a few years ago. It was intended mainly for women going back to the twentieth century and working as wartime nurses, but Kivrin had wanted every kind of expertise she could get. She rolls Roche onto his side in best ward-sister style, bringing the next fold of the shroud around like fresh bedding, and thinks, _I was practicing for this. I was always practicing for this._

It's a matter of brute strength, as much as skill, but she has more of that than she used to. Her hands are as hard and her nails as ragged as any native of the fourteenth, these days. She feels only pleasantly warmed by her work by the time she lifts Roche's head to slide a fold of the shroud beneath. Kivrin hesitates before covering his face. Her mind flits to the vidder in her pack--she could make a record of this, of him.

Kivrin is about to make Ashencote the most famous village of the fourteenth century, of all Mediaeval Europe. If she gives Ashencote a face, that face will be everywhere. It will stay with her for the rest of her professional life. It will stay with her exactly as it is, and she will get older and, she hopes, stronger and wiser. She will see Roche become young and frail and far away, the common property of all of history.

Kivrin touches his cheek with her gloved hand, and then folds the linen over it and tucks the cloth down so that it won't flap free when she moves him.

There is a set of lightweight metal rods in the pack; as Kivrin recalls she filled in a form suggesting they might be useful as a sort of improvised scaffolding for recording in tricky locations. Kivrin takes them out and snaps them together: two two-meter poles, with four cross-supports between them. She fishes out a pair of small caster-wheels, activates their magnets, and has an instant stretcher-dolly.

It takes a bit of work to roll Roche--now a long wrapped bundle--onto the stretcher, and he takes up nearer to all of its length than she quite believed he would, but in the end she manages it. She is prepared for the awkward effort of getting the head-end of the stretcher up off the ground, prepared for the effort of balancing it, for the difficulty of rolling the small wheels on the uneven stone floor of the church. She is not prepared for how low she has to bend to keep from inclining the stretcher so steeply that Roche begins to slide, but she smiles a little as she backs her way across the nave, bent nearly double. If it had all gone smoothly she would hardly have believed she were really here.

She is forced to set the stretcher down when she has nearly reached the door, and after a moment of awkward maneuvering, she goes and gets the snap-light and wedges it between the door and an uneven flagstone, to serve as a doorstop and allow her to back out through the open door with her hands occupied. She's laughing a little giddily by the time she emerges into the moonlight towing Roche. She manages to get him across the track without bouncing him off in any of the ruts, and drags him through the snow on the green by main force, aiming herself toward the spot she chose for his grave by dead reckoning.

Kivrin realizes she's found it when her foot sinks to the ankle in warm, damp earth. She loses her balance and her grip on the stretcher, and winds up falling into the steaming patch of bare, thawed ground as Roche thumps down into the snow. She holds very still for a moment, gently rotating her foot in the dirt--if she's sprained or broken her ankle _now_\--but everything moves, and the pain is already dulling by the time she sits up and eases her foot free. The boots are very sturdy, and seem to have prevented any harm.

She looks around for the shovel, and finds that it's fallen sideways; the ground softened as it thawed, of course, and no longer held it up. She picks it up and uses it as a support to get to her feet, stretching cautiously until she's sure she's unhurt. Then, with a last glance at Roche, she begins digging.

She's practiced this, too: helping Montoya and other Mediaeval archaeologists, doing farm work every chance she gets to keep in practice. It's not even the first grave she's dug, thanks to her third drop to the fourteenth. The shovel makes a difference, and so do the gloves, and the good night's sleep she had last night. She doesn't even think the coffee she had with breakfast has had time to wear off yet. The ground she's digging smells like spring, as out of place in this frozen night as Kivrin herself.

She knows better than to stop for more than a minute in freezing weather. She'll only get cold and stiff. She sifts the heat-tubes out of the loosened earth and closes her hands around them for a count of thirty before she tosses them back down to keep working. It gets dark down in the grave, with the moon setting a little ahead of sunrise, but her eyes adjust; she squints and feels her way along and keeps at it. Most of her muscles are burning--dully, in her legs and lower back, and bright and hot across her shoulders and arms and hands--by the time the grave is shoulder-deep. It's as far as she can reasonably dig.

Her arms fail her when she tries to pull herself up at the edge.

Kivrin has a moment's panic--_trapped in the grave she dug herself_\--and then she turns and gathers up the three thaw tubes and closes her hands around them. She counts all the way to sixty, considering her options, and when she opens her eyes she turns, sets the nearly-exhausted tubes in the snow beside the grave, and then raises the shovel and uses it to snag one end of the stretcher. Roche tumbled mostly off when she dropped it, and she's able to tug it out from beneath him and over to herself. She tips it into the grave, plants one end firmly in the still-frozen dirt at the end of the grave, and climbs out on the cross-supports, which are now ladder rungs. She doesn't think she put _ladder_ on the form she filled in.

Once out of the grave, she forces herself to stand and stretch her protesting muscles, waving her arms and stomping her feet. When she is quite sure that she will at least be able to get around--and when the worst of the adrenaline seems to have passed off--Kivrin goes and pulls up the stretcher and lays it next to Roche in the snow.

"Thank you," she says, checking that he's still wrapped up. "For everything."

She uses the shovel to lever him back on; he seems to have got stiffer out here, frozen harder, perhaps, and that makes it easier. She drags him over, lining him up at the side of the grave. It _is_ long enough, thank God. She sighs, wishing for an auto-winch, and then she tips him in, wincing at the hard thump of body on earth. He lands more or less straight, at least, and wrapped in the shroud it's less obvious whether he's right side up.

"Requiescat in pace," she pronounces, and remembers that the very first grave she dug was not two years ago, in 1387. It was here, up the hill, for Agnes' puppy. Roche's burial, marked with the mass and the bells five years ago yesterday, is a good deal more Christian.

"Goodbye, Roche," she says, and then she forces herself to get moving again, using the shovel to dump the quickly-refreezing dirt back down into the grave. The wind died sometime while she was digging, and by the time she has filled the grave the moon has set and the pre-dawn glow lights everything in gray, warmer and with more promise of color than the stark, flat light of the moon and stars.

Kivrin goes into the church to collect the light and the nearly-empty pack, and finds herself kneeling before the rood screen again without remembering any intention to bend her knees. She feels the lingering muddy touch on her forehead, though, which tells her that she did cross herself again on the way down. She folds her hands--though the gloves will keep her corder from activating--and says, "I did it. I did it."

She waits for the shivers to pass, and then she feels around in her bag for the packet of high-energy quick-absorption goo that she can use to replace food for about twenty-four hours before her body demands something that requires chewing. The artificial chocolate taste--to say nothing of the quick improvement in her blood sugar--is comforting, and she's soon on her feet again, gathering up her things.

She goes out to the green again, breaks down the stretcher and detaches the wheels. She hesitates a moment before folding up the shovel; Roche's grave is a dark gash in the ground, standing out starkly in the snow. After a moment's hesitation, Kivrin uses the shovel to toss snow over the bare earth, giving it a little cover. Then she folds up the shovel and puts it and the bright orange thaw-tubes into the pack, and checks the inventory list attached to the inside. Snap-light, stretcher components, caster wheels, shovel, gloves, the wrapper from her snack, all are accounted for.

Kivrin takes the vidder from its secure pocket and goes to the bell tower. She never had occasion to climb the stairs to the top when she was here the first time. They're narrow and steep, intimidating even in her current state of health, but if she's going to make a visual record she can't pass up the chance of a panoramic view.

She starts out walking with her shoulder to the wall, but by the time she's curved around one hundred twenty degrees--and is high enough to break her neck if she falls the wrong way--she's nearly crawling. She holds the vidder pressed to her side and leans up with her free hand on the stair ahead of her. She can't afford to fall, and she can be as careful as she pleases. No one is watching.

The stairs end in a small platform under the bell. The tower has two windows, east and west, without glass or shutters. Kivrin starts the vidder--the three-dimensional scanning function takes a moment to boot--and stands staring out the western window toward the village. There are still faint stars visible in the deep blue of the western sky. The village looks beautiful from here, smoothed over with snow, as long as you don't stop to wonder why no smoke rises from any fires.

The silence is broken by a chirp from the vidder, and Kivrin raises it and takes a long pan of the view from the window, south to north. She vids her way around the bell platform, getting as much detail of the bell as she can--if there's an inscription, analysis of the 3D scan will turn it up later, as long as she's gotten every available angle.

When she reaches the eastern window, there is a bright gold line at the horizon. Kivrin blinks quickly, and the vidder gives an irritated squawk as it adjusts its light-levels. When they're both ready to look again, Kivrin squints eastward, looking for Oxford--but though the tower gives them some elevation, Ashencote is in a valley, well below her first vantage point near the old drop. She's not sure whether the smudges on the horizon are Oxford, or intervening hills, or clouds. It doesn't matter. The scan will sort it out.

She turns the vidder off and after a dizzy moment standing at the top, she goes down the stairs sitting down like a little child, bumping from step to step with the vidder cradled in her lap and one hand constantly tugging her skirt out of the way. At the bottom she vids the tower and the stairs, and then she goes out, collects her pack, and begins her tour of the village in earnest.

She circles the outside of the church, keeping it on her right and moving sun-wise. She stops at each stained glass window and does not neglect to pan up to the roof and down to the foundation. Inside, she circles each pillar and lovingly scans the tomb and the statue of St. Catherine. She scans the rood screen, the crucifix and the paintings of the Last Judgment. She pauses to show the layperson's view through the screen, and then she steps through the opening and moves up to record the altar. Roche's Latin copy of the Gospels is there--Kivrin remembers, from a long way off, that she had fetched it at some point after he died. Now she scans the book, every page, then sets it neatly back in place.

When the church is thoroughly documented, there is still the churchyard. Kivrin collects the shovel from her pack and uses it to scrape away snow from those graves marked with stones. The data from her corder and the testimonies she wrote out afterward will serve to identify the unmarked graves; still, when she comes to stand over the smallest, freshest grave within the churchyard proper, she says quietly, "Agnes."

She vids the graves on the green without remark, though the disturbance of Roche's grave will be obvious to the scan. Then, keeping the vidder as steady as possible, she follows the track into the village proper, stopping to circle each hut before entering and documenting the contents. Most of them, to Kivrin's practiced eye, are in good order; she resists the impulse to tidy the others, only occasionally picks up an object to be sure the artifact in question is thoroughly documented.

She reaches the manor end of the green, and faithfully records the privy--the smell is already dissipating, though it might just be the cold--and the pigpen, noticing for the first time that it stands empty. A section of the withy fence is knocked down; perhaps they escaped, like Maisry, and will populate the forests of England with feral boars.

The vidder makes discontented noises as she enters the dim passage between barn and stable, but it adjusts faster than her eyes do. She emerges into the courtyard and scans it before moving on to the house.

The great room shows more sign of the disaster than any other place in the village, with the makeshift quarantine barricade still half in place and the things Kivrin had attempted to pack scattered on the floor. There is a mass of rats near the hearth. Kivrin vids them without comment. It really wasn't their fault. Not this time. Not here.

She goes up the stairs and scans the bower, including the few remaining contents of the chest, the chamber pot, and the view out the window when she pushes the waxed linen aside. She suffers a moment's temptation to lie down on the bed, but she remembers the last person to lie there--the envoy, seizing with plague--and remembers that as soon as she finishes the last of her survey, she can go home and lie in her own bed. After a hot shower, or perhaps even a hot bath. There's not much left now, just the outbuildings and perhaps a look at the southern road.

She hurries back out to the courtyard and heads for the stable, but stops short inside at the sound of breathing.

She recognizes it after a moment--or it recognizes her, rather, for the cow picks up its head and lows reproachfully. She is, after all, still unmilked, and a whole new day has dawned. Kivrin steps in closer, and discovers that the cow, Roche's donkey, and Gawyn's stallion have all taken refuge together.

Huddled together in one stall, three different species in three different sizes, they remind Kivrin of nothing so much as the vids that are forever circulating among the History Department of little Finch-Lewis kittens being fostered among litters of puppies so they'll learn to be house pets. There are inevitably images of the mother dog fussing over her strangely puny offspring, or the kitten playing fiercely with a sibling twice or three times its size.

Kivrin gets close enough to scan the three of them--if nothing else, the Department will enjoy a change from kittens and puppies--and the cow soon gives up on lowing and goes back to leaning against Balaam's side. Gringolet watches her attentively, ears pricked, but she doesn't need a ride anywhere today.

She goes to the barn next, leaving the door open behind her. Rats have already gotten into the hay and grain here, but there is enough to keep Gringolet and Balaam and the cow for a while. Her wagon is still there, and her boxes. She vids them, for completeness, and then climbs up to the loft. There are still a couple of pallets made there, and Kivrin regrets the coverlets left behind. They might have wrapped Rosemund in one.

She climbs back down and goes across to the kitchen--more rats--and the vacant dovecote and then, last of all, the brewhouse.

It's startlingly warm inside. She can smell mash rotting, which must be giving off heat, and the small building had been as firmly sealed as any structure in the village. Not entirely sealed, though; in the light from the door, Kivrin can see a seething mass of rats already at the mash. One of them, sitting still on the edge of the group, is enormous; she thinks of Finch-Lewis kittens again, and then realizes she's right to. The enormous rat slowly lifts its head, slowly wags its tail, and tries to bark.

It isn't enormous at all, for a puppy; she can see its ribs even in the poor light. She'll be able to measure every one of them from the scan. She looks away from the puppy when a rat brushes against her ankle, and she looks down to see them passing in and out of the door she's left open. She looks up when the puppy yips again. Still weakly wagging its tail, it takes a step toward Kivrin and blunders into a rat, which snaps at it.

Kivrin is suddenly holding the puppy against her side, one hand under its sunken, rib-studded belly. She can feel its heart beating against her palm. There's a bleeding bite on the puppy's foreleg, and Kivrin thinks about infection. She thinks about the fleas the rats are bound to have carried to the puppy. She thinks about the fact that the net won't allow the bacillus to pass through.

She says very calmly, years and miles away from the sobbing protests she has heard herself making on the corder, "You are not going to die. Not you."

She waves the vidder around to get an image of the inside of the brewhouse, and then she turns and walks out. She takes the puppy across the courtyard to the marginal shelter of the stable, where the friendly beasts are gathered.

She kneels down near the stall the animals are occupying and lays the puppy in her lap, then digs to the bottom of the pack. There's a packet of antiseptic and plasters in the small emergency kit; she applies both to the rat bite while the puppy squirms weakly. Holding it against her chest, she stands again and looks around. She has to keep the puppy warm, and she has to feed it; she doubts chocolate-flavored energy goo will suffice.

There's a bucket by the door; Kivrin fetches it and, after a moment of hesitation, she lays the puppy across Balaam's back. The donkey doesn't seem to notice, and the puppy nestles against his back and seems in no immediate danger of falling off.

Kivrin milks the cow at last, leaning her forehead against its bony side. She closes her eyes as the rhythm of it comes back to her, and only opens them when the cow makes an irritated noise and tries to sidestep. Kivrin gathers up the puppy and kneels again, tipping the bucket nearly over and holding the puppy half inside it. She worries that it's not old enough to drink, but if not, it is motivated to learn. The sound of enthusiastic lapping emerges from the bucket, and the little tail wags.

She can feel the puppy's belly expand in her hand; when it's drum-tight she pulls the puppy out and tips the milk bucket upright. The puppy licks at her gloved fingers and then nibbles. Its milk teeth are sharp even through Kivrin's glove, and she offers it the strap of her pack instead.

She studies the puppy as her thoughts circle uselessly around the fact that she ought to leave it and the fact that she has already interfered in the course of Ashencote's history as much as humanly possible. If she had known where the drop was, she would have tried to take Rosemund back through the net, Roche, Agnes, Eliwys. Even Imeyne. She would not have succeeded, according to the simulations run in the labs after the whole Kindle Incident. Even a doomed human seems to matter too much to history.

But doomed animals by and large do not. This puppy--smaller than Blackie though it cannot possibly be much younger, its fur an undistinguished mousy gray-brown that coordinates neatly with the dull shade of Kivrin's gown--was not even an animal of particular import to the contemps. It was no one's fine hound, no pet nor hunting dog. If it was not put into a sack and drowned in the nearest river, it was only because no one could be bothered even to kill it.

"You're a Finch-Lewis kitten," Kivrin tells the puppy, which has fallen asleep with the pack-strap still in its mouth. She tugs the bit of leather away and adds, in case the puppy did not understand, "You are a nonsignificant object."

The puppy stays asleep, and beside her the animals shift comfortably in their stall.

Kivrin reaches into her pack and checks the handheld; she's only minutes away from the intermittent opening for her, if it's going to open. If the net will let her bring the puppy through.

She carries the puppy and pack to the doorway of the stable; from there she can see the flattened circle she made to mark the drop, nearly eight hours ago. The air will sparkle when the net opens, if the net opens.

"Even if the puppy carried plague bacillus through, it wouldn't have a significant impact on the twenty-first century," Kivrin remarks in the general direction of the drop. One of her hands is absently trying to smooth down the puppy's fur, but it's either curly or hopelessly cowlicked.

"I'm inoculated, and I could keep it isolated until it's been decontaminated and treated with antibiotics. Even if anyone at the lab were exposed, they'd only need a booster shot; I could warn them immediately of the possibility of contracting the disease, and they could take preventive measures to keep it from spreading. In the scheme of things, it really couldn't hurt anyone at all."

It's her first drop under her own aegis; it will count heavily against her reputation. If she comes back carrying a puppy--a darling little souvenir--she'll be known for it. But she's already known for the work she's done as a junior historian, and Kindle's career has certainly managed to survive the Incident. Finch and Lewis are heroes for bringing back kittens. And everyone who knows she came back to Ashencote knows her reasons cannot have been entirely cold-blooded.

Anyway, she doesn't especially care. Her career may be in the twenty-first century, but her work is here, in the Middle Ages, and she is here, and the puppy is here. She is not going to let anyone else die in Ashencote.

The net opens, and Kivrin gets to her feet and walks to it, calmly, without hurry or hesitation. "You are a nonsignificant object," she remarks, glancing down at the sleeping puppy as they cross the cobbles. "You are the air in my lungs."

She steps through into the warmth of the lab. The first thing she sees, as the sparkle of condensation dissipates and the shields lift, is Dunworthy standing on the opposite side of the thin-glass. She finds she's not surprised at all. He never comes to watch her leave on a drop, but he often happens to be there when she returns; of course he's here today.

This time, she happens to note, he's wearing nondescript dark clothing. Not particularly mediaeval, but it would pass at five meters on a trotting horse. He moves toward the door, and Andrews stands to relieve her of the pack, but Kivrin puts her free hand out.

The puppy, perhaps wakened by the change in temperature, picks his head up, wags his tail, yips, and promptly urinates down her side. She feels the heat of it, but her gown is nearly waterproof, and already thoroughly soiled. Andrews backs away to the other side of the console. Dunworthy pauses with the door ajar and raises his eyebrows.

"I rescued him," Kivrin says evenly, ignoring Andrews' reproachful look in her peripheral vision.

"Ah," Dunworthy says. He seems to find it a sufficient explanation, because his eyebrows resume their normal position and he comes through the door. He's carrying a first aid kit and a towel. "Well, that does make you responsible for him."

The puppy--who has started chewing on her gloved finger again--is far from Kivrin's only responsibility. "I promised the space-time continuum I wouldn't let him have contact with anyone who hadn't been inoculated against plague."

Andrews walks out, shutting the door firmly behind him. Dunworthy tucks the first aid kit under his arm and begins wrapping the towel around the puppy, easing him out of her grasp. "I had my inoculation four years ago, Kivrin. It's fresher than yours."

Four years ago, Kivrin had done a drop to the end of the Fifteenth. Until today, she's never dropped within ten years of an active plague outbreak. Four years ago, Dunworthy already knew that if she was going back anywhere, eventually she would need to go back to Ashencote. She's trying to think of what to say when the lab door opens again.

Colin comes in as if he belongs in the lab, though he won't for at least another year; everyone has become inured to his presence. Dunworthy doesn't even warn him away when he runs up to peer at the puppy.

"Hi, Kiv, welcome back," Colin says, already petting it. "You didn't start another Kindle Incident, did you? I can help you fix it if you want, I've had my plague shots."

Kivrin looks up, and up, at Colin's face--at seventeen he's already well on his way to a full two meters. He seems to have more or less accepted Kivrin's constant assertion that mediaeval contemps were never, ever that tall, and that he'd be better off in Twentieth Century. Kivrin doesn't think she could endure being responsible for him, but Dunworthy seems to take it more or less in stride.

"No," Kivrin says, and lets Colin take her pack when he reaches for it. "No, I'm finished with Ashencote."


End file.
